'Earth Focus' Documents How a New Jersey Town Reclaimed Its Water Supply After Decades of Chemical Pollution

Toms River, N.J. was the sort of place people romanticized about as a quintessential setting for the American dream—until a dye manufacturer began dumping its toxic waste in the local water supply.

People were thrilled to welcome Ciba Geigy to Toms River in the '50s, but soon the town's reputation inspired monikers like "cancer hotspot." Unfortunately, that didn't happen until after more and more people moved to town believing the local government's assurance that everything was just fine.

Earth Focus spoke to some of those people who are old enough to remember the transition their town underwent, including the horror their families felt when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the company a permit to build a 10-mile pipeline enabling the company to dump its waste directly into the Atlantic Ocean. Those people also recall how the pipeline burst in the middle of town years later and how residents, attorneys media and more fought back to reclaim their drinking water.

In the episode's latter half, Earth Focus examines illegal gold mining in Peru and its tragic impact on human health and the environment. The topic was featured in the 2012 film, Amazon Gold.

EARTH FOCUS airs every Thursday at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) on Link TV—channel 375 on DIRECTV and channel 9410 on DISH Network. Episodes are also available to watch online at linktv.org/earthfocus.

The world's unregarded forests are at risk. Intact forest is now being destroyed at an annual rate that threatens to cancel out any attempts to contain global warming by controlling greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

As the world's population grows and the planet warms, demand for water will rise but the quality and reliability of the supply is expected to deteriorate, the United Nations said Monday in this year's World Water Development Report.

"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

Despite a court-ordered injunction barring anyone from coming within 5 meters (approximately 16.4 feet) of two of its BC construction sites, opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion sent a clear message Saturday that they would not back down.

Twenty-eight demonstrators were arrested March 17 after blocking the front gate to Kinder Morgan's tank farm in Burnaby, BC for four hours, according to a press release put out by Protect the Inlet, the group leading the protest.

Climate change is a big, ugly, unwieldy problem, and it's getting worse by the day. Emissions are rising. Ice is melting, and virtually no one is taking the carbon crisis as seriously as the issue demands. Countries need to radically overhaul their energy systems in just a few short decades, replacing coal, oil and gas with clean energy. Even if countries overcome the political obstacles necessary to meet that aim, they can expect heat waves, drought and storms unseen in the history of human civilization and enough flooding to submerge Miami Beach.

Trump has loudly declared his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but, behind the tweets and the headlines, U.S. officials and scientists have carried on working with international partners to fight climate change, Reuters reported Wednesday.

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.